This rich and rather baffling little book, written in the 1920s and only now appearing in English, is the workof a novelist who was also one of the highest-paid journalists of his time. Joseph Roth's Foreword is pugnacious, listing those by whom 'this book does not want to be read', among them those who want to distance themselves from their embarrassing forefathers, and 'objective' readers who, 'out of sheer humanity, are struck with pity at inadequate sewage systems, and whose fear of contagion leads them to lock up poor immigrants in tenements where social problems are solved by simple epidemics'.

His journalism is usually impressionistic, though it breaks out occasionally, as the translator drily remarks in his Preface, into 'anxiety and statistics'. This, for instance, is from his description of the Jewish quarter of Odessa: 'The evening there is a curse, the rising moon a mockery. A thick fog presses down like a condemnation behind each window, which also serves as a door, is the workshop; behind that is the bed. Over the bed are the children, suspended in bassinets, which misery rocks to and fro.' An evocation of Yom Kippur uses a similarly literary register: 'Heavy tears trickle down their old beards, and their hunger is taken away by so much pain in their souls and by the immemorial melodies that fill their ecstatic ears.'

Roth's gift of phrasing, which can switch without warning from lyrical sentiment to irony, never deserts him, but the clarity, though intense, is local. It would be unreasonable to expect a responsible commentator to be satisfied with any one of the options open to European Jews at the time - assimilation, emigration, Zionism - but in different parts of the book Roth seems to be on both sides of every question.

Assimilation is a form of cultural suicide, given the 'deadly, antiseptic boredom' of Western civilisation. Jews newly arrived in the West, who compromised their traditions, 'gave themselves up. They lost themselves. They shed their aura of sad beauty. Instead, a dust-grey layer of suffering without meaning and anxiety without tragedy settled on their stooped backs'. Sometimes, he seems doctrinaire as well as simply unsympathetic - 'The assimilation of a people always begins with the women'. For Jews who have so identified themselves with their country of residence as to fight and die in wars he reserves his harshest verdict: 'I blame them for it.'

Zionism, though, is no sort of answer, already in its way a byproduct of assimilation since nationality is a Western invention. Roth more or less treats nationhood as an aspect of their history that Jews have overcome. Way back in the past, they defended their borders, conquered cities, crowned kings and paid them taxes. Why regress, when nations invariably have 'vested interests that insist on sacrifices'? By defining the essence of Jewish experience as he does, Roth is able to engineer a superb paradox, that any future Palestine might be a sovereign nation - 'but it wouldn't have any Jews in it'.

As for emigration, it can't be considered separately from the question 'where to?', and Roth is unconvinced by any destination. He pictures emigrants to America languishing behind bars on Ellis Island in an interminable quarantine, dreaming that their children will become 'kings of some mineral or manufactured substance'. He has more faith in the good intentions of Soviet Russia (a faith nervously reasserted in his preface to the new edition of 1937). But even there, the best-case scenario is only assimilation into minority nation status. Though as an ideologue of the Left he can salute the freeing of the victim from his torments and the bully from his compulsion, he is still attached in some way to hardly compatible religious ideas of 'the divine grace of suffering'.

The strangest thing about The Wandering Jews, as Hoffman acknowledges, is that Roth nowhere identifies himself as Jewish. When he says 'we' or 'us', he means Western Europeans, indeed Germans, and it's hard to describe this as anything but assimilation. The cultural law that Jewish jokes can legitimately be told only by self-identified Jews seems to govern passages where the irony is hard to assess, like his jaunty tribute to the heroism of Jews who chose to mutilate themselves rather than serve in the Great War. The book is full of passages that seem close to contempt: 'The Eastern Jew is afraid of ships. He doesn't trust them.' 'Jews are easily moved - I knew that. But I didn't know they could be moved by homesickness.' If his intention was to avoid special pleading, then it is an admirable one, but the effect is still highly unsettling. No doubt our modern commentaries are vitiated by a debased politics of personal authenticity. But the combination of passion and the third person will always stir echoes of the rhetoric of hatred, even when the intention is quite opposite: to create a rhetoric of love.